Needles (sic) to say, I've had kind of a weird semester. Still, I practiced one big PBL technique again (students-teaching-students) in my Poetry of Rock class, and it went very well. I still need to schedule in more time for it, though, which includes time for better assessment of student learning. I had everyone in the class write a minute paper after each group-teaching session to demonstrate what was learned. But I need to clarify the specific learning goals for those teaching sessions, and then make sure the minute papers (or whatever) provide evidence that those goals were met.

I also had group members evaluate each other following their presentaions, and this went pretty well. One group did have some discord, which could have been prevented had I provided materials and ideas early on about how to avoid such discord. In the future, somewhere in the middle of the planning phase for these presentations, I might engage the whole class in a discussion about how to deal with conflict within groups--or, better yet, have a speaker come in to address this. Suggestions for speakers?

Would like to hear from more of you--What did you all do for PBL this semester?

Hi--I don't know if anyone is still checking this (ever)--I know I have been remiss (a gentle word for lazy and checked-out), so I'm sorry. It seems if I were to be a better cheerleader, writting compelling and witty things here everyday, you'd feel compelled to check and respond. (But of course, at best, I'm witty one day a month, and compelling even less regularly.)

So how's the semester going? I am loving my first year class. The students are active, funny, good writers, generally smart and analytical. We are just moving to our second unit——child's play--where we'll write about children's culture. Their research will go toward writing and producing a children's book, as well as evaluating a children's movie and researching and analyzing a toy or game. We'll do a lot of hands-on stuff in terms of looking at toys.

My 320 and grants classes are very problem-based, and the students are doing well (though I'm not comfortable saying they like the classes). But I've been happy with their work (websites for a business in 320, proposal for a business in the grants class).

I'd love to hear about how things are going for you all. --Betsy

My semester has gone fairly well. (The results aren't all in at this point, though. I'll know much more when I see all of my 110 final projects.) The big question for me, as for Kevin, is whether our particular, semester-long, course-based problem worked. I'm guessing at this point that I've had moderate success. Some of the small PBL activities I used were maybe a bit more than moderately successful. All of it, as far as I can tell right now, was a good start and definitely gives me a lot to think about and improve.

I'll probably offer some thoughts here over Christmas break.

I'm sold (as I figured I would be) on PBL, though I think it does have its limits. Was talking with Betsy recently about some probs she had in a class full of verifiably nonsocial personality types. (Kara Stack or someone went into her class and actually tested the students.) This might make for an interesting paper: what happens to PBL methods when you get students who simply don't/can't interact? I guess no method or pedagogy works 100% well, 100% of the time; people are just too weird and unpredictable.

I think the "investment" issue, along with relevance, is huge. A topic really has to matter to students for it to work well. If it doesn't matter to them, at best a class can only be a so-so experience for everyone involved. One big problem I think is that our students, along with everyone else these days, are just overwhelmed with pressing obligations, jobs, etc., and things like blogging can get pushed out of their schedules if it just isn't vital enough to them. Which doesn't mean they can't or don't want to use it--just that it can't compete with other things that have priority in their schedules and lives. (Blogging was an element of the experimental 110 that Kevin, Sybil and I cooked up.)

Nuff.

How did everyone's semester go? I think I can say that the "problems" I posed to my students only partially engaged some of them ; ). What did work was my problem-based assignment called "the stretch." Students had to stretch themselves and learn a "new literacy" skill, or improve a new literacy skill they have just started working on. They got to define "the problem;" they got to work on a problem that interested them.

Betsy's presentation at the luncheon in Nov. touched on this issue. When her fall class got invested in the problem, the course was an overwhelming success. When the spring class got only mildly interested in the problem, the course had an engagement level and outcomes similar to a "regular" class. That actually seems like good news.

You're in a convolution groove, Kevin. Makes perfect sense, actually.

Cindy, interesting that you hit on the coverage problem--not one we comp. people often worry about, but other disciplines do. PBL challenges most people to worry about coverage. The standard response: students are learning to learn and learning to collaborate in your class, and that is better than not learning how to write when we assign all the writing they don't really engage with.

Could I be more convoluted?

Apropos of nothing: Phyllis Diller Pedagogy.

I took a look at the assessment thing, but didn't actually use it--only because there was too much going on in class recently and I've been falling chronically behind on my schedule. It looks perfectly useful, though.

My 110s are doing another round of group teaching sessions right now, and I think they (and I) are getting better at it. It's one of the most PBL-flavored activities we've done so far, and is turning out to be much more interesting than I would have thought. Each group was given a topic related (sometimes a little distantly) to the next two paper projects and a slew of open questions. They were then told to simply "teach" that topic to the class (I'm simplifying, but that's the gist). I gave them a lot more time to plan than I did before, and it's going pretty well.

For one thing, it's bringing a whole additional level of performance into the class picture and makes a variety of demands on the students. I'm astounded (happily) at how REAL the audience issue is in this "writing" activity. They seem to be truly presenting for their classmates, and not just me for once. (My paper assignments have suffered from the "audience problem" for years--can't get them to imagine any audience but me, which is understandable, since in reality I AM their main audience, even though I'm always trying to make them pretend that they're writing for someone else to give them practice with real, nonacademic or at least real, non-Ms. Peabody Teacher audiences.)

It's kind of touching too how each group, when "teaching," makes such an effort to involve the whole class in interactive stuff. All I had to say was, "Well, you might not want to stick with straight lecturing, because you all know how boring that is!" and I only had to say it once. It obviously RESONATED for them. (It also made me realize that the whole "repetition and emphasis" thing regarding instructions flies out the window when something just hits home for them. In other words, sometimes I have to repeat a bloody instruction a gazillion times, and even then they still don't always seem to hear it or apply it. When I say something that just makes immediate sense to them, however, suddenly they aren't deaf or daydreaming--I say it once and they've got it.)

Another kind of miraculous thing going on here: they are actually taking responsibility for their membership in the group. Not all, and not always well, but even the relative non-participants (slackers) seem more plugged-in and aware of the hazards of procrastination or missed classes. And it's not just me they have to say "sorry" to--it's several other people, their own peers.

Some other strong points of this exercise: they are showing off some pretty decent media skills. We've seen 3 really nice Power Point presentations so far, and one guy (son of Lonnie Hass in Math) put together a video of himself acting in a mock game show! He played the part of the host and the contestants, and spliced it all digitally together so that he's on the screen with himself in every scene (dressed differently, depending on how dumb or not-dumb the contestants were).

This is getting long--more later, maybe. Oh, one last thing: I'm still worried about the "coverage issue." Specifically, I worry that this exercise takes so bloody long that we're not getting other things done (especially writing!). In the future I might somehow integrate more writing into the whole thing, and I'd possibly turn it into an entire unit in itself.

Anumlik.

How many of you used the formative assessment? I haven't looked at my results yet--too scared. But also some of my students were having trouble getting logged on, so I said I would leave it available through the middle of this week.